now, if only they'd pay us

Editor and Publisher reports on a new survey showing that "74% of adults -- nearly 171 million -- in the United States read a newspaper in print or online during the past week."

The survey also found that:

79% of adults who are employed in "white collar" jobs read a newspaper online or in print; that 82% of adults with a household income of $100,000 or more read a newspaper in print or online; and 84% of adults who have college or advanced degrees do the same.

Clearly, good journalism is still very much in demand. If only we could get paid to do the work.

all about the numbers.

Good, bad, indifferent. Some quick hits:

Read here about a newspaper bailout bill now working its way through Congress. Is Obama a fan?

San Francisco Chronicle Editor-at-large Phil Bronstein goes on HuffPo to combine two words you rarely see in the same sentence: "future" and "print" and to offer his take on the above.

Finally, the bad news: journalism jobs are disappearing at three times the rate of other jobs throughout the economy, says Editor and Publisher.

But, but, but. The audience for news isn't going away. Still need people to do the jobs. We can sit and moan or we can put the thinking caps into overdrive. I vote for door number two. Ideas? bk

print: the online driver?

Editor and Publisher offers the new list of the top 30 online newspaper sites as of March 2009. Not surprisingly, the New York Times took the top spot.

What may be a surprise, however, are these indicators that online-onlies may not provide enough cash to save daily journalism, at least not yet: The article cites Scarborough Research, which found that the number of adults who read newspapers only on the web was a meager 4 percent.

What's even more of a surprise was the fact that the traffic to the website for the Seattle Post Intelligencer -- which recently killed its print edition -- fell off the list completely, down 23 percent over the past year.

Could it be, posits Jennifer Saba, the article's author, that it takes print to drive people online? Scary thought, especially as newspapers continue to shut down -- or threaten to do so.

Or could it be that when we go looking for for online-onlies, we're looking for sites such as HuffPo and Talking Points Memo that provide a whole new model?

No answers -- but you have to think that, maybe, that London study got it right. bk

the future of news: all digital

Go here to find Steve Outing's vision of the all digital newspaper. In a column in Editor and Publisher last week, he predicted that the future of news will be more like a conversation between reporter and reader than the current one-way delivery of news, that it will be fully multi-media, that updates will be instant, and beat-blogging will be as prevalent as what we now know as reporting.

All of which can certainly rev up what we now know as news. But Outing also predicts that in this digital vision, tech staffs will have to size up, while the number of reporters may, of necessity, size down. Read between the lines, and you have to wonder: Are there enough hours in the day for the reduced staff of reporters to carry on conversations with citizens, feed their blogs, edit video and sound slides, update their facebook and twitter accounts .... AND still get out to do some credible reporting? My head spins.

Tom Wolfe once offered this advice to a roomful of students upon their graduation from j. school: Never take a job that keeps you inside the building. You do the math. bk

objectivity, redefined. again

Editor and Publisher columnist Joe Stupp poses an interesting question today about how, when new media is folded into old, we are forced to reevaluate what we mean by objectivity. He thinks that may be a good thing.

What we now consider journalism has morphed into a digital hybrid of straight reporting, blogging, commentary, and personality journalism -- complete with the dreaded first person -- often on the same webpage. And with one reporter often wearing several of those hats, lines blur.

It's not that the core values of journalism -- honesty, accuracy, fairness -- don't still hold, even when it comes to blogging and commentary, Stupp's piece suggests. But maybe now that one form is bleeding into the other, it's time to throw the old definition of objectivity as a 50/50 balance straight out the window.

And acknowledge that it never really existed anyway.

From the column:
Andrew Malcolm, who has covered politics since 1968 and blogs at the Los Angeles Times' "Top of the Ticket," says he still treats each item like a fact-based story, but with some buzz and style. "Most non-newspaper blogs are committed, one way or another — there is a slant," he says. "They are selling a particular view. Our niche is to be sort of unexpected. But it is possible to be a real professional. Cover something straight and develop a perspective to inform your discussion."

L.A. Times Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus points out the different views of what is objective. "I think it means presenting every side of an argument fairly in ways that the proponents would accept as valid," he says.

But more and more, both new media and old-fashioned news types are disagreeing with that approach. The growing trend is that the truth must surpass the 50/50 doctrine. "We have gotten it so wrong with the idea of giving equal play to both sides," says Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of Huffingtonpost.com and a longtime proponent of trading arbitrary "balance" for truth. "We are not always going to be balanced. Very often, it is one side or the other." She cited the ongoing arguments against global warming, which she contends mainstream journalists allowed for too long to go unchallenged: "We wasted a lot of journalistic capital on global warming trying to be balanced." She says the recent government rescue of financial institutions is another, noting too many mainstream outlets did not question if the bailout was needed: "Those of us who live online already dismissed certain elements of the bailout, such as the lack of oversight."

Adds [Keith] Woods, [dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute]: "Whether you quote both sides does not change what is the truth. We allow the 50/50 idea to substitute for truth. Where we often fail is when we may get somebody on one side with deep knowledge, understanding, perspective, and credibility to speak and on the other side someone with just an opinion, but they have no credibility."

[Boston Globe Editor Martin] Baron agrees: "We are involved in journalism, not stenography exercises. It is finding out what is actually happening. Balance means every story gets 50/50? I don't believe that."